Fingerprints of the electron skew-scattering on paramagnetic impurities in semiconductor systems

Applied Physics Letters. 2021. Vol. 118. Article 032105.

Rakitskii M. A., Denisov K. S., Rozhansky I. V., Averkiev N. S.

In this paper, we argue that the electron skew scattering on paramagnetic impurities in non-magnetic systems, such as bulk semiconductors, possesses a remarkable fingerprint, allowing us to differentiate it directly from other microscopic mechanisms of the emergent Hall response. We demonstrate theoretically that the exchange interaction between the impurity magnetic moment and mobile electrons leads to the emergence of an electric Hall current persisting even at zero electron spin polarization. We describe two microscopic mechanisms behind this effect, namely, the exchange interaction-assisted skew scattering and the conversion of the spin Hall effect-induced transverse spin current to the charge one owing to the difference between the spin-up and spin-down conductivities. We propose an essentially all-electric scheme based on a spin-injection ferromagnetic-semiconductor device, which allows one to reveal the effect of paramagnetic impurities on the Hall phenomena via the detection of the spin polarization-independent terms in the Hall voltage.

We thank H. Jaffrès and H.-J. Drouhin for helpful discussion. The authors acknowledge the financial support from Russian Science Foundation Project No. 17-12-01182 (theoretical model) and from Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR) Grant No. 18-02-00668. K.S.D., I.V.R., and M.A.R thank the Foundation for the Advancement of Theoretical Physics and Mathematics “BASIS.”

Keywords: semiconductors, spintronics, Hall effect